In recent years, the Internet community has grown at an astounding rate. Similarly, the number of products directed to the Internet has grown concomitantly with the dramatic growth of the Internet community. Among the products directed to the Internet are email products, instant messaging (IM) products, video conferencing products, voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) products, and many more products that employ the Internet as the backbone for their operations.
The rapid expansion of Internet-directed products is generating an accompanying increase in the sophistication of Internet users, which is, in turn, generating a further expansion of products directed to the Internet. This positive-feedback cycle results in various vendors launching their own Internet products using various technologies that are conducive to fast capitalization of such an expanding market. Thus, while many of the products from the various vendors provide largely similar services, the discrepant technologies used by the various vendors produce problems of interoperability between the various products. For example, while vendors such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and America On-Line (AOL) provide relatively similar instant messaging (IM) services, the underlying protocols employed by the various vendors differ vastly. Thus, in order for Microsoft's IM product to communicate with Yahoo's IM product, the underlying protocol must be translated from Microsoft's protocol to Yahoo's protocol. Similarly, in order for Microsoft's IM product to communicate with AOL's IM product, another translation must occur between Microsoft's protocol and AOL's protocol. As one can see, for interoperability between protocols used by the various vendors, a translation must exist for each protocol for which there is desired interoperability.
Thus, in the past, each IM service had a translation protocol for as many other IM services to which it sought to provide interoperability. Unfortunately, since all communications with a particular service was routed from server to server for this type of approach, any failure in the path resulted in loss of all messaging with a particular service. Additionally, a failure in the server often resulted in loss of all services provided by that server. Moreover, because all messages to other services were routed through the server, the server was required to process all of the messages to all of the services, thereby resulting in greater delays in all services.
In view of this incompatibility among the various vendors, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began soliciting input from the Internet community to address the problems of incompatibility. This resulted in the adoption of several recommendations by the IETF. For example, Request for Comments (RFC) 2778 and RFC 2779 provide guidelines for presence and IM. However, apart from general features associated with IM, RFC 2778 and RFC 2779 provide very little instruction for actually implementing IM by various vendors.
This lack of instruction resulted in further study by members of the IETF, who published several memos and recommendations for Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM). However, the IETF efforts only address a fraction of the problems dealing with interoperability.
Thus, a heretofore-unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.